In a conventional transaction involving a merchant and a customer, the merchant generally provides a statement of charges (a “bill” or an “invoice”) for an amount of money owed for goods or services the customer has acquired or consumed. In some situations, a group of customers may share the goods or services. For example, consider a group of customers seated at the same table in a restaurant. Each customer may want to pay for the items he or she ordered, or the customers may want to split the bill equally among themselves. Typically, in either case, each customer ends up providing his or her debit or credit card to the merchant, so that the merchant can swipe each card to charge an appropriate amount to each customer. However, the merchant can swipe only one card at a time on a card reader, and after each swipe, the merchant needs to wait for authorization from the card payment network. Thus, splitting the bill in this manner is time consuming and burdensome for the merchant.
Some existing applications have attempted provide a solution for bill splitting by shifting the burden from the merchant to the customers themselves. However, many of these applications merely enable each customer in a group to select the items he or she ordered from their mobile devices (e.g., smartphones), and calculate an amount that he or she is responsible for. The merchant still needs to swipe the customers' cards to charge the amounts the customers have determined using the applications. Thus, the existing solutions have not been successful on making bill splitting less time consuming and burdensome for the merchants.